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Dem Debate: Can Republicans Bring the Heat?

After the last Democratic debate, it is even more abundantly clear what today’s Democratic party stands for and what the party stands against.

Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders spent most of their time going after things that hold American society together – the military, the police, and free-market economics – while supporting ideas that can really be condensed into a two-word promise: “Free stuff.”

Sanders continued on his crusade for expanded Medicare, expanded Social Security, and tuition-free public colleges. Never mind that both Medicare and Social Security are on the verge of collapse and that, as the great Milton Friedman once told us, “there is no such thing as a free lunch.” Tuition costs cannot be magically made to disappear. Someone will pay those costs. They can only be transferred.

Sanders also declared education and healthcare to be human rights. This is a genius strategy: simply declare your agenda to be a “human right,” thereby shaming the other side into accepting it. It is a way of shutting down one’s opponent before a real argument can even get off the ground.

Clinton, being the morally pure candidate that she is, railed against money in politics. That is particularly laughable, given her record of charging lavish speaking fees and accepting countless shady donations for the Clinton Foundation.

Clinton and Sanders also fought over who was the most pro-abortion candidate. Of course, this was the result of internal sparring between the candidates themselves, not the result of tough questions that the moderators should have asked, such as “Should it be legal for a baby to be dismembered the day before childbirth?” or, better yet, “Do preborn women have any rights at all?”

Watch the debate here:

The Democratic party, at this point, has moved so far to the left that the Republicans are practically being handed this election – and are seemingly desperately trying to lose it. Sanders and Clinton are extremely beatable, yet the Republicans have yet to offer a candidate who can successfully exploit their flaws and win while holding to conservative principles.

Gallup polls have consistently found that a plurality of Americans identify themselves as conservatives.

It is true that some Americans do hold the radical views of Clinton and Sanders, but the number of those people is dwarfed by the vast swaths of conservatives in “flyover America.” For many years, roughly twice as many people have identified as “conservative” than “liberal” in America. This is why it’s not about “electability” in the sense of finding the most moderate-leaning Republican – it’s about finding a candidate who represents conservative views and values. “Conservative” is electable. That’s why Reagan won and John McCain and Mitt Romney lost. But Republicans each day come closer and closer to nominating someone who is not a conservative.

Will the Republicans get their act together and nominate someone to run against Sanders and Clinton who will defend conservatism while utterly demolishing them on a debate stage? Or will conservatives choose to nominate someone who either does not have a conservative record or someone who, like McCain and Romney, did not represent conservative values and subsequently lost? Only time will tell.